There’s a world of difference there. But people tend to reduce religion down to the instinctual moral instincts that religion is often attempting, through its elucidation, to inform and correct. It’s hard for us to grasp and maintain a focus on transcendent ideas and categories. We picture things most easily in human terms, quite literally. We humanize everything, we anthropomorphize everything, we personify everything. And so although it’s very admirable and useful to try to take a set of people or a set of behaviors and extrapolate to the underlying common element that is the actual problem, bad (incorrect, harmful, antihuman, maladaptive) behavior or bad belief, it’s the most natural thing in the world to reverse the process and simplify the behavioral and ideological struggle to “bad people”.

In seeking to reject this simplification, we sometimes today mischaracterize and reject the very structures established to help guide us and educate us and help us avoid those mistakes, and that do so openly in a way that can be viewed and codified and has been through a process of historical testing and explication. And we fail to realize that by sweeping them away we dont stop the process of simplification. We merely bury it and become less aware of it. So we go on being the worst kind of reductive religious zealots. Those who are completely unaware that that’s what they are, or even what the stable content of that faith consists in.

By abandoning “organized” religion, because it tends to be reductive, we do not succeed in ceasing to be reductive. That’s a universal human tendency, and organized religion was put in place partly to deal with this very problem. All we really end up with is disorganized reductive religion. And it’s not clear that that’s an improvement. Although not being aware of the religious structure and its failures might provide some measure of comfort, if not real world benefit.